Unravelling the dark web

Forget South American cartels and Russian arms dealers: the
black market has moved online

Update 2/10/13: As news breaks that Silk
Road has been seized by the FBI, revisit GQ's feature from
the February 2013 issue on the underground drug market and its
mysterious founder.

On a chilly April morning in 2011, in the Dutch city of
Lelystad, Marc Willems was sitting at home on his computer, surfing
the web, when the police burst in and seized him. At that moment,
more than 5,000 miles away at El Dorado airport in Bogotá,
Colombia, migration officials and agents from America's Drug
Enforcement Administration were arresting another man, Michael
Evron, as he was attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires.
Within 24 hours, agents across America had rounded up six more men
- in Iowa, Michigan, Georgia, New York, New Jersey and Florida.

By the end of the day, the US Department of Justice was hailing
Operation "Adam Bomb" as the first of its kind. They released a
66-page court indictment, compiled over two years and listing
numerous charges, but it boiled down to one thing: the men, they
alleged, had been operating a website, the Farmer's Market, that
acted as an online narcotics marketplace - an illicit eBay, if you
like - where drug dealers could peddle their wares to customers in
34 countries. But the Farmer's Market wasn't your average website -
for one, the address didn't work in a regular web browser. It
belonged to the "dark web": a growing number of sites hidden from
Google and the prying eyes of law-enforcement agencies, using
anonymity technology. In a written statement, Briane M Grey, the
acting special agent in charge of the operation, issued a warning:
"Today's action should send a clear message to organisations that
are using technology to conduct criminal activity, that the DEA and
our law-enforcement partners will track them down and bring them to
justice."

Want to buy an M4A3 assault rifle, a forged UK passport
or a few grams of crystal meth and have it delivered to your door?
On the dark web you can

But on the dark web, the Farmer's Market wouldn't be missed.
Despite the dozens of agents involved in Operation Adam Bomb, the
site was small-time. Its competitors had long outgrown it. Worse,
in the eyes of dark- web users, the Farmer's Market had made
mistakes that allowed law enforcers to seize e-mails and payment
details. The site had been around for years, they said. It hadn't
been careful enough. Meanwhile, business on the online black market
was booming.

Silk Road

Around the turn of the millennium, researchers at the US Naval
Research Lab in Washington DC had a problem: how to protect
military communications from eavesdroppers online. With help from
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they
developed a solution: a program known as Tor. This hides your
identity online by encrypting transmissions and bouncing them
between thousands of users around the world - from Birmingham to
Beijing via Berlin and Baghdad, say. Anyone monitoring the
communication would be incapable of discovering the location or
identity of the sender.

In 2006, Tor became a nonprofit organisation and now attracts
more than 500,000 users a day, from Arab Spring bloggers to Chinese
dissidents. But Tor doesn't just hide individuals - it can also
hide entire websites. Whereas a web page might be traced to a
server farm or your office's IT department, a hidden site's
location is buried in the network. The address operates only when
accessed over Tor. You can set up a site from a hidden location,
with an unlisted web address, and - so the theory goes - remain
completely anonymous. Welcome to the dark web.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Oliver Franklin is Assistant Editor of Wired and a GQ contributor. Follow him on Twitter @olifranklin.